Holding a pair of spoons with concave sides facing out and a finger between their handles, Jeff Davis wowed a packed auditorium as he played the spoons and sang traditional American folk music.

"I’ve never seen someone play the spoons before," said Lauren Murphy, 11, a fifth-grader at Riverdale Elementary School. "It was unique."

Davis, a collector and interpreter of traditional music, gave a history lesson to Riverdale students on Friday, April 11. But not a conventional one.

He used instruments, like a handmade banjo, guitar, bones and the flute, to highlight the idea of the folk process and oral tradition.

He played New England ballads sea songs, African-American banjo tunes, cowboy ditties and Native American melodies, while talking about the instruments and telling the stories of the people who wrote the songs and what their workdays looked like.

"Most kids have never gone to a live performance, so I just try to make it as much of a human experience as I can, and I hope that they come away with a little sense of American History," Davis told the Transcript at the end of his performance.

Max O’Connor, 11, was captivated by Davis’ performance of a sea-shanty, the song sung on board of large merchant sailing vessels.

With the help of six fifth-graders, Davis pulled a white rope that was hooked to a doorknob to demonstrate the singing of a sea-shanty while raising a sail.

"He was showing how it felt to be the crew of the ship pulling the sail," said Max, who was one of the students helping to pull the rope. "It was hard at the end."

Like Max, Greg Abellard, 11, enjoyed the rope lesson because it was interactive.

"I liked it," the fifth-grader said. "I got to do something."

Davis especially sparked kids’ curiosity when he started playing with a limberjack, an Appalachian wooden folk toy.

"How long did it take you to learn all of this?" one boy asked.

Davis grew up during the folk revival era of the 1950s and 60s. He was introduced to folk music when a man visited his seventh grade class and shared his collection of folk songs, he said.

Since then, Davis has traveled through the country, visiting farmers and miners who remembered the old tunes, as well as libraries and archives, in search of songs that were once common in towns and villages.